A Republican-appointed judge and President Obama’s own handpicked Surveillance Review Group both came to the same conclusion last week: The National Security Agency’s controversial phone-records program has been of little real value to American security. Yet its defenders continue to insist that it is necessary, clinging desperately to long-debunked claims about foiled terror plots. Their stubbornness fits a decade-long pattern of fear trumping evidence whenever the word “terrorism” is uttered—a pattern it is time to finally break.

Since the disclosure of the NSA’s massive domestic phone-records database, authorized under a tortured reading of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 authority to obtain business records, intelligence officials and their allies in Congress have claimed it plays a vital role in protecting Americans from “dozens” of terror attacks. But as the expert panel Obama appointed to review the classified facts concluded, in a report released Wednesday, that just isn’t true.

“Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks,” the report found, “and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders.”

In other words, instead of vacuuming up sensitive information about the call patterns of millions of innocent people, the government could have followed the traditional approach of getting orders for specific suspicious numbers. As for those “dozens” of attacks, the review groups found that the NSA program “generated relevant information in only a small number of cases, and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.”

Instead of vacuuming up sensitive information about millions of innocent people, the government could have followed the traditional approach of getting orders for specific numbers.

The report came just days after Judge Richard Leon, appointed in 2001 by President George W. Bush, found the telephony program likely violated the Constitution. Leon found the program’s invasion of privacy especially troubling given the “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics,” and declared himself unconvinced that the program “has ever truly served the purpose of rapidly identifying terrorists in time-sensitive investigations.”

Leon’s opinion cited a thorough report by ProPublica documenting holes in the intelligence community’s talking points, including a “foiled plot” to bomb the New York Stock Exchange that appears to have been largely imaginary. The suspects in that case were never charged with planning an attack: The real “plot” seems to have been to con an American terror sympathizer out of funds his foreign contacts hoped to use to open an appliance store.

This confirms what informed critics of the program have been saying for some time. In an amicus brief recently filed in support of an ACLU lawsuit, several senators with access to the classified details argue that there is “no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through less intrusive means.”

Even the FBI may not believe its own public rhetoric in support of the program. An exchange reported in Garrett Graff’s book The Threat Matrix quotes former FBI director Robert Mueller describing what appears to be the 215 phone program as a “useless time suck.”

In fact, the very first use of the 215 authority was not to gather up bulk phone records; it was a bit of show for the benefit of Congress. As documented in an exhaustive 2007 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI had been relying on another Patriot Act authority to obtain phone records. But by 2003, as one FBI attorney explained to the Inspector General, “there was a recognition that the FBI needed to begin obtaining Section 215 orders because… Congress would be scrutinizing the FBI’s use of the authority in determining whether to renew the authority.” In other words, the power wasn’t used because it was necessary: It was used to convince Congress that it was necessary.

And yet on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney stuck to the same discredited talking points, calling the program an “important tool” and falsely claiming that “at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information, so lives have been saved.”

Unfortunately, Carney’s stubbornness is no aberration, but part of a pattern we’ve seen all too often over the past decade. Just like the NSA, we now have more than enough data to “connect the dots.”

President Bush authorized the NSA to conduct wireless phone wiretaps shortly after September 11 attacks. When The New York Times revealed the program, administration officials insisted it was effective and vitally important. Former NSA Director Michael Hayden claimed that it had “been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States,” while Vice President Cheney went further, asserting that the program had “saved thousands of lives.”

When the intelligence community’s inspectors general finally published an unclassified report on the program, however, it noted that officials “had difficulty citing specific instances where [the program] had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes.” A senior CIA official told NSA historian Matthew Aid: “We spent a ton on the program but got back very little in the way of solid returns. I don’t think it was worth the money.”

Intelligence officials have hailed “fusion centers”—information-sharing hubs massively funded by the Department of Homeland Security over the past decade—as a “vital, proven tool” and a “centerpiece of our counterterrorism strategy.” Just last year an extensive, bipartisan Senate investigation concluded the centers had produced no useful counterterror intelligence but had risked violating the Privacy Act by generating reports of citizens’ First Amendment protected activities. Various “success stories” invoked to show the usefulness of the centers, the Senate investigation found, did not stand up to scrutiny.

"We spent a ton on the program but got back very little in the way of solid returns. I don’t think it was worth the money.”

In other cases, rather than claiming bogus success stories, the officials have sought to expand their powers by blaming inadequate surveillance authorities for intelligence failures.

Consider, for example, the “lone wolf” authority approved soon after 9/11, which allows powerful foreign intelligence surveillance tools to be used against terror suspects without any demonstrable link to a foreign group. The need for this never-used power was supposedly illustrated by the case of “20th Hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, whose laptop the FBI supposedly failed to search in time to discover the planned attack on the World Trade Center because agents could not show an adequate tie to foreign terrorists.

Yet a very different picture emerged in a scathing 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee report. After the attacks, the report noted, investigators were able to obtain a conventional warrant using the same evidence that had previously been considered inadequate. A warrant hadn’t been obtained earlier because supervisors at FBI Headquarters had failed to link related reports from different field offices, or to pass those reports on to the lawyers tasked with determining when a FISA warrant should be sought, and misunderstood the scope of their own existing legal authorities. "In performing this fairly straightforward task," the report concludes, "FBI headquarters personnel failed miserably."

Then there’s the tale of three captured soldiers in Iraq, invoked in 2007 to show the need for the predecessor to the FISA Amendments Act, basis for the NSA’s PRISM program. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had supposedly ruled that even totally foreign communications could not be intercepted without a warrant if they were picked up as they passed through the United States. As a result, claimed then-Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, a time-sensitive effort to wiretap the insurgents believed to be holding the soldiers was delayed for 12 hours.

Only later did it become clear that the delay was due to internal bureaucratic wrangling, not the new court ruling—which had not even taken effect yet, and in any event, would not have required the government to obtain a warrant in such an emergency situation. As James Bamford recounts in his book The Shadow Factory, it turned out that several of the subjects of that wiretap were already under surveillance, but it didn’t matter: The NSA’s primary target was quickly captured by troops in the field, and found to have been uninvolved in the kidnapping.

Perhaps most egregious is the case of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a former acquaintance of the perpetrators of the 2005 London transit-system bombings. Though he was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, FBI Director Robert Mueller later told Congress that investigators had been delayed in obtaining the suspect’s education records because they were not covered by the bureau’s National Security Letter authorities—supposedly showing the need for a broader power to demand records without judicial approval. “We should've been able to have a document, an administrative subpoena that we took to the university and got those records immediately,” Mueller testified.

Yet it later came out that an FBI agent had quickly obtained the records under a traditional grand-jury subpoena—then, with the documents in hand, been ordered over the phone to return them and try again with an NSL, even though NSLs clearly didn’t apply to education records. The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it needed more power.

While we may sometimes have to trade a bit of privacy for greater security, the Review Group rightly argues that we must demand evidence that we are really getting that security, relying on rigorous cost-benefit analysis rather than dramatic anecdotes. After a decade of bogus claims that intrusive programs are necessary to keep us safe, it is high time for Americans and lawmakers to stop being played for suckers.

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig discusses how Aaron Swartz's death shaped his own life's work.

Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he was just 14, convinced the professor to radically change his career path.

The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide. Lessig is still reeling from the loss.

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.